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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18871 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.

...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).

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I posted the following earlier in the CW thread; reposting here in case someone finds the reference links useful.

If polling aggregators are a thing you find interesting, here are links to 538's 2022 Election Forecast page and RealClearPolitics' Election Central 2022 page.

If you're going to be glued to the television/internet tomorrow evening, and want to know what races to watch as early indicators, here's an hour-by-hour breakdown from Decision Desk HQ, and their General Results homepage. The night will begin at 7 PM EST with a trio of key Congressional races in Virginia, and the Governor and Senate statewide races in Georgia. At 7:30, start looking for returns from North Carolina and Ohio.

One of the reasons DDHQ is one of the best locations for US election returns is that their analysis pays particular attention to margins of victory, not just winners and losers, in forecasting outcomes on election night. Sure, a particular county might always vote Republican, but if the margin is R+5 on the night in question, that's very bad news for Republicans if the county was R+15 in 2016. You'll also see a lot of "if this race is called early for the Democrat, that's good news for the D party; but if the call is delayed, that's good news for Rs" or vice versa, depending on the race in question.

I also recommend predictit.org, whose markets are likely better at synthesizing news updates into simple probabilities. As a bonus, the live comments are often hysterical.

Blue team is on sale on the senate market. Only 21 cents. Very tempted to buy. I believe 79/21 is not realistic odds.

In the last few hours, betting market odds for Democratic control of the Senate have surged. Up to 33-35%, from 21% only a few hours ago...

Oh, boy, it's time for the annual political spin and deflection season!

I'm going to dispense with any poll-tracking or statistic-tealeaf-reading and go with my gut here. I think the Republicans will gain the senate while Dems squeak by in the house, making no one happy and reverting the system back to the 2nd-term Obama status quo. This is good for dramacoin. Nothing makes Americans more politically engaged when their legislature starts throwing DNS errors. The imperial presidency grinds on...

'22 is only significant, in my mind, as the pre-season for Trump Strikes Back '24. Fetterman and Oz is a preview of a greater contest, between a mental invalid and a scruple-less grifter. As much as my little accelerationist heart quivers at the idea of the VP debating Trump, it's most likely that we are witnessing the Last of the Boomer Civic Nationalists fight it out. The last of the people who value a liberal rules-based international order will croak in the next eight years.

God help us all.

Who will gain control of America's imperial hegemonic power? The right-populists, or the left-populists? Will the civil war be averted for another generation, or will it happen in my lifetime? The fate of the nation may very well be decided on which geriatric old man has a fatal stroke first. What you see today in politics - the insanity, the terror - this is not the nadir of the republic's fortunes: it is merely the threshold unto the abyss.

In time, we will look upon the misfortunes of our day as a golden age lost to time and tragedy.

But perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps electing corpses is the future of American politics. We have the technology to continue the life of brain-dead patients indefinitely. In the Oval Office, there is a mighty chair beneath the Resolute Desk, a Golden Throne, that will sustain the president's life for as long as it needs to be. A thousand infants are sacrificed each year to feed the device's need for adenochrome, perpetuating the beacon of boomer power from Washington, DC forever.

Anything to avoid electing someone from Gen X.

Gack, my memory is hazy. You are correct.

I'll leave the mistake as it is, as a mea culpa, but I believe the rest is essentially true.

The last of the people who value a liberal rules-based international order will croak in the next eight years.

Why do you think this happened? I tend to agree with your points even if I think you're being a bit overdramatic.

Is the Internet really all it takes to make us revert back to tribal lines?

I for one liked the prose, it was inoffensive and fair.

The fundamental bargain of neoliberal capitalism is that you'll forgo radicalism, tribalism, and religiosity in exchange for bourgeoise prosperity. It worked, until the gains of industrializing the world ran out.

The internet didn't cause the problem, it just makes it obvious that A) everyone is getting poorer and B) your elites still expect deference for riches they no longer provide.

So why care for a system that no longer works for you? Why care for global prosperity when you're getting none of it? When you bear the burden of upholding the order?

Populism will prevail, and the world will burn while the Americans prosper off the chaos.

Populism will prevail, and the world will burn while the Americans prosper off the chaos.

Why do you think Americans will prosper off the chaos? American hegemony can't last forever and China seems much more ready and willing to fight for the gains than anyone in the west these days from my view. I agree with the rest of your post but I don't see things working out as well for the US.

History belongs to those that show up. In other words, when your population will be half seniors by 2080, you're not a competitive Great Power, no matter how much automation you have.

To put a blunt point on it: no matter how many Chinese boomers have a boner for aggressive foreign policy, they can write checks that their youth can't cash.

it just makes it obvious that A) everyone is getting poorer

US inflation-adjusted incomes (whether personal or household) were declining slowly from around the dot-com bust through the end of the Great Recession, but have since made back the decline with a lot to spare. House sizes never stopped increasing, uptake of new technologies is faster than ever ...

and the world will burn while the Americans prosper off the chaos.

If we take the perspective of "the world" (though isn't this a bit of a digression, in a thread specifically about American polarization in a post specifically about American elections?), even recent American economic growth aren't as impressive as the average growth in the rest of the world. State-of-the-art tech is great, but catch-up growth is easier and more important. Living in a bigger house is nice; not watching your children die is nicer. The gains here have not started to run out.

People feel poorer because they can't own homes and they can't start families. That's a qualitative reality that no amount of quantitative statistics can capture. Something that, I note, that our much poorer ancestors accomplished (albeit, with effort, but not an impossible amount of it.)

I think that people feel poor because they have a ton of exposure to people more rich than them. Status is always relative, and the advent of social media (and really modern media in general) has made the wealth and lifestyles of the very rich extremely legible to the middle class. It's that differential that drives people "feeling poor", imo.

As a newly minted social conservative, bullshit.

Having a house and a family was within reach of the working and middle classes decades ago. Social media is a cope. People just have to compare themselves to their own parents to know that something's wrong. Seeing insta snaps of someone's conspicious consumption might annoy the superficially narcissist but if you rent a tiny apartment and you're single in your thirties you know that someone has fucked you.

In the main CW thread, someone asked for predictions of electoral outcomes.

I'd now like to ask for predictions of financial markets, pending electoral outcomes. How do you think the stock market will respond if the GOP sweeps Congress or if Dems hold onto one or both chambers? And have you changed your investment portfolio in any way to reflect your thesis?

My prediction:

If GOP sweeps, markets rally 3% by EOD Wed. Narrow margins (e.g., 51 seat Senate) will result in 1-2%, whereas larger margins (say, 53 seats) yield 4+%.

If GOP retakes the House only, markets decline by 2%. If Dems retain both chambers, markets decline 4%.

Meanwhile, I expect markets tomorrow to end the day up 1% or so, perhaps in anticipation of a narrow GOP sweep.

The reason for my prediction is mainly that the public generally sees the GOP as being better at handling the economy than the Dems. Institutional investors may or may not agree with that assessment, but I expect retail will be bullish with a GOP win. Energy stocks will rally disproportionately given the GOP is far more friendly to domestic oil production and will not consent to windfall taxes, though green stocks will decline. Pharma should go up as Congress will be less likely to "negotiate" drug prices etc. But stocks in general should go up because the odds of corporate tax rate hikes will fall to near zero. While federal regulatory agencies will still be run by Biden's appointees, Congressional oversight will likely result in more muted policy issuances.

I'm long on stocks and have not made any portfolio adjustments as a direct result of the upcoming election.

The other day, the Fed raised interest rates and Jerome Powell made a statement that the market interpreted as him suggesting that he was going to loosen monetary policy so it shot straight up. Then about an hour later, he clarified that their interpretation was wrong and the market crashed hard. Here's the best advice you can get on predicting how the market will react to news.

The data shows neither party is better or worse. Both support lots of government spending, which is good for the private sector . Healthcare stocks are a good investment regardless, owing to the tendency of Americans to get fatter and older ,which means more $ for healthcare paid for employer-sponsored coverage. Thus, healthcare stocks, especially health insurers, benefit both from two longstanding trends: corporations having record profits (some of which goes into health insurance) and Americans getting older and unhealthier , as well as more elective/unnecessary procedures. I don't see any of these trends changing.

I think the stock market has priced in results close to Nate Silver's final predictions (likely GOP house win, toss-up Senate). I think a surprise Dem hold of the house is positive for markets because it avoids tail risks associated with a government shutdown and/or debt ceiling crisis. Given a GOP house, Senate control doesn't matter that much to the things markets care about - legislation is gridlocked anyway because Biden has a veto, the Deep State can run the executive branch even if people can't get confirmed, and there are no Fed Governors with terms expiring during the next Congress. So I predict no obvious market response as long as the GOP do take the house.

Markets have now closed. Revisiting my predictions:

On election day, I predicted markets ending up 1%; S&P 500 increased by 0.3% in real life.

The day after, I predicted 2% decline if the GOP retakes the House only*, and indeed S&P 500 declined by 2.1% today.

*Elections aren't called yet, but PredictIt has GOP House and Dem Senate at 70%, followed by GOP sweep at 24% and then Dem retain both chambers at 14% (not adding up to 100% because PredictIt).

Now I'll be the first to admit that there are a billion confounding variables, including the mess with cryptos and FTX, but I'll still chalk this up mostly to a W because it's impossible to account for everything in the markets!

I'm really hoping that the Republican wave coming our way (I have some positions on Republicans winning both the House and the Senate) will cool the fire on leftwing extremism. We need a de-escalation in this country and it's never going to happen while left-aligned people continue to belabor their most noxious positions.

A sound defeat might be just the thing to correct some of the worst excesses of the morality police.

That was my thinking in 2016. It didn't work then, and I don't expect it to work now. This stuff has reversed in the past, but the previous reversals, to my understanding, involved economic prosperity that got everyone too busy making money to worry about ideology. I'm not sure we've got another of those coming, and there's reason to worry that this time might be different in any case. Still, if you're looking for hope, that's where I'd look for it.

It seems like modern history has been something of an anomaly where we have had back to back revolutionary gains in productivity. Prior to the industrial revolution, there were long periods of marginal gains punctuated by smaller revolutions such as the printing press. Unless AI or some new energy source can come along and make us more productive I fully expect us to slide back into tribalism.

Doubt it. It will just make the left more entrenched in their views, like after 2016

I don't see your inference that a republican victory will de-escalate things. The last time republicans won on populism, partially on the back of "basket of deplorables" , left extremism (if that's even the right word) kicked into overdrive. The lesson learned in 2016 — based on IRL conversations, not just Twitter — was that the country is shockingly still full of dangerous racists who need to be suppressed. I predict a similar reaction if Trump-backed candidates outperform expectations.

If anything, a republican drubbing might lead to de-escalation, if that's actually what you care about. McConnell's concern about "poor candidate quality" risking a slam dunk GOP victory will come true, the populists will be discredited. The RINO wing of the party will resume control. Things will go back to "normal".

If anything, a republican drubbing might lead to de-escalation, if that's actually what you care about. McConnell's concern about "poor candidate quality" risking a slam dunk GOP victory will come true, the populists will be discredited. The RINO wing of the party will resume control. Things will go back to "normal".

Yes, the "normal" where [Mitt Romney was a dangerous theocrat who was going to implement the Handmaid's Tale if elected. Even in 2018 still tarred with that brush, before he became "the only good Republican" for being anti-Trump. That "normal". For a certain section of the Democrat side (and this is based on what I see online, so that is going to be both the most exaggerated and the smallest), there is no acceptable Republican because Republicanism is evil. Get rid of the populists, and the moderates left are next for the "this guy is the worst person since Hitler" rhetoric. The only acceptable outcome is a single-party state, where the Democrats are in control forever, and then the real work of reform and restructuring can happen.

there is no acceptable Republican because Republicanism is evil. Get rid of the populists, and the moderates left are next for the "this guy is the worst person since Hitler" rhetoric. The only acceptable outcome is a single-party state, where the Democrats are in control forever, and then the real work of reform and restructuring can happen.

I don't think this is exactly an inaccurate view of a significant segment of the left, but I think it oversells how unified the Democrats are. There's a good amount of messaging that the Democrats are an awkward alliance of the left and center-left (erm, whatever those terms mean) that is held together by defending from the evil Republicans that want to destroy elections and ban contraception, and if the Republicans were out of the way, they could hold elections on actual policy, not whether or not to elect the evil(TM) candidate. Although I guess you may be saying that no matter how far the Overton Window moves left, the right side (even if they're currently part of the Democratic Party) will always get called an evil that must be defended from as opposed to a legitimate alternative to be discussed on merits.

Mitt Romney was a dangerous theocrat who was going to implement the Handmaid's Tale if elected.

Admittedly, I haven't read past the Wikipedia summary, but it certainly sounds like Mitt Romney's position on abortion has changed a lot in the past several years:

In a 1994 debate with Senator Ted Kennedy, Romney said: "[...] I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it, and I sustain and support that law, and the right of a woman to make that choice, and my personal beliefs, like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign." Romney had endorsed the Freedom of Choice Act which would define legal access to abortion as a federal law even if Roe is overturned.

[...]

In 2020, Mitt Romney signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

(He made other anti-Roe comments in the intervening years according to that article; I'm just trying to stick to minimal interpretation of his comments and the published amicus brief just seemed like the most clear-cut one.)

This does make me wonder: for a few years now, or at least dating back to like 2018 or so, some people in this sphere were saying that we're about to see a political re-alignment of the parties. What would it look like? Democrats switching sides to R and trying to appeal to voters they may have once spurned, out of sheer pragmatism?

I hoped for that in 2016, but nobody seemed interested in reflection then. Six years of TDS later, do you have a reason to believe that this time will be any better?

I believe a lot of issues are tied up with Trump specifically, rather than policy positions.

If trump announces that he is running again (and possibly winning) we're in for more extremism from both sides.

If Trump announces that he isn't running and that he is endorsing someone else then I think tempers can cool down.

If trump announces that he is running again (and possibly winning) we're in for more extremism from both sides.

What do you see as an extremist position that is currently being pushed by Republicans or that you expect to be pushed if they are in power?

My expectation is that Trump will take legitimate concerns, lie about them, fail to do anything about them and then rile everyone up, eagerly helped by media and other Democrat aligned businesses.

That sounds more lame than extremist, which is pretty much what I expect as well. Whether a literal border wall is a good idea or not, it's not an extreme policy, and I am not inclined to concede the point that it is simply because people react histrionically to Trump.

There are two different types of political extremism, I think. A Republican wave would make the leftists desperate and more extreme outside power structures (to the extent that they even exist outside those). The opposite would make them arrogant and more extreme within them. The only things that would deescalate their extremism in the long run would be federal student debt cancellation, the nationalization of healthcare, a federal minimum wage and so on.

So the only way to prevent extremism is to give the Democrat extremists exactly what they want?

Would you buy "the only way to prevent abortion extremism is to ban abortions, giving them what they want"

Right up there with, "if you're upset about illegal immigration, then just make immigration legal!" retorts. No, I actually want to win on this issue, it's not a mere technicality or question of appropriate paperwork.

Theoretically it's always possible to simply repress the extremist opposition. But that is not a case of deescalation.

I personally think it is entirely within the power of the mainstream democrat/left wing to reign in their extremists (excepting that last 1-3% of real hardcore who will just lash out regardless) with a little bit of carrot and stick (emphasis on stick) but there's seemingly very little political will to do so. Not the least because the leaders of the party are likely insulated from any impact they could cause.

It's definitely a major risk of couching your side as the 'resistance' and letting your people train in political insurgency since those tactics can be turned against you when you try to bring them back into the fold.

Something something we have to arm the moderate rebels to fight the radical ones.

(disclaimer: I have ceased to care about what the radical left or right get up to, as long as it is far away from me and my family. I live in a safe neighborhood in a safe town)

A sound defeat might be just the thing to correct some of the worst excesses of the morality police.

Undoubtedly there are extremist elements on the left (and right) who will be outraged regardless of the outcome. I think the better question is what comes after Republicans winning the house and senate.

Do we spend two years investigating Hunter Biden and impeaching Sleepy Joe as revenge for impeachment of Trump, or do we try to craft common sense compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era? Do we unite around democracy and liberalism in the face of Russia invading Ukraine and China doing China things, or continue to sour on our ideals and flirt with authoritarianism? I don't mean taking military action against either, but for America to lead the free world it has to believe in it, and it has to believe that is more important than what are mostly low-stakes domestic squabbles. Unilateral action from either side won't lead to de-escalation; all the stakeholders need to buy into it.

compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era?

Bill Clinton (D), whose laws today are derided by dems as being too racist, ie too rightist. Yet it is the Republicans whom the media accuses of moving away from the centre.

Weird compromise where even if one party wholly adopted the positions of the other, it would still be insufficient.

Meanwhile, the right bitches about NAFTA, free trade, globalization, trickle-down economics and military intervention abroad even as they pushed it in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. What? You don't want those things anymore? Huh. Funny how that works.

About 20% of the electorate was too young to vote during the Clinton era. Pretend population growth was zero and another ~20% of voters died in the last 25 years. So maybe 40% of the electorate turned over...and you're surprised that neither Democrats nor Republicans want the same things they did? The fact that you want the 90s frozen in amber forever rather than the 70s or 50s says more about you than the media or either political party.

Was military intervention right-coded in the Clinton era? I wasn't politically engaged then but I know in the West Wing "Republicans want to have the biggest army and never send it anywhere" was presented as a commonplace joke.

You appear to have missed the word "compromise", and have concluded that the legislation in an era with a Democrat president perfectly reflected the policy positions of the Democrats regardless of who held the legislature.

Was the error founded in ignorance or partisanship? Either way, you're part of today'a political problem.

I'd be thrilled with a few years of gridlock. For legislation, "better than nothing" is a high standard.

Do we spend two years investigating Hunter Biden and impeaching Sleepy Joe as revenge for impeachment of Trump, or do we try to craft common sense compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era?

The first one.

Both parties have learned that bipartisanship is bad because it's better to have no wins than give your opponents a shared win.

No, democrats won’t de escalate, I mean they decided to run on abortion up to birth with a side of gun control in Texas of all places while their candidate was busily moderating his positions on energy and taxes. Everything we know about these people suggests they’d rather lose than moderate.

I dunno, independently of what your positions on those issues are, do you think those are the ones hurting the Dems at the moment?

Of course I'm just an outside observer, but insofar as I've seen - apart from inflation and general economy, which are a whole other category - the culture war issue where the Dems have moderated a lot from two years ago is crime, ie. they're not talking about defunding the police and indeed seem to be explicitly repudiating such stances.

This is in Texas specifically though?

Maybe they're going for the "throw yourself against the wall enough times and it'll break eventually" tactic?

I think that an unwillingness to move towards the center on those issues is a major reason for democrats' perception as being socially extreme, yes.

Alien vs Predator 3: No Matter Who Wins, We Lose.

Some final thoughts and commentary on this race, focusing mostly on the campaign ads. I had wanted to link the ads I'm seeing as I discuss them, but there does not seem to be any easy repository. Some of the Oz ads, or similar clips, are available on his website and Youtube channel. Fetterman has a much more expansive listing of clips on his Youtube channel, but they don't seem very similar to the ads I'm actually seeing FIVE TIMES EVERY COMMERCIAL BREAK. Note that this is all in the Philly market.

Let's start with this Fetterman ad which is not one I've ever seen on TV, though there are some similar themes, and some glaring omissions. The ads I see do hit that note about wanting to "cut taxes for working families", but I have never seen a Fetterman ad say one word about the minimum wage. His ads talk about how Oz has 10 mansions, but Fetterman wants to cut taxes and make sure no community gets left behind and he definitely wants to fight crime and get more stuff made in Pennsylvania.

He still plays this like he's an anti-establishment Republican; you could be forgiven for thinking he was a moderate Tea Partier. Zero references to progressive or left-wing causes, he is nativist, vague on actual policies, but he is definitely One Of Us, not like that Turk.

On a related note, Josh Shapiro has a spot running where is also in favor of cutting taxes, and promises to put parents on the state education board. Taking in the tenor of these campaign pitches, I would be very morose if I were a leftist.

Fetterman does also have another ad running a lot, with a very positive, uplifting tone, where he doesn't say anything negative and ends by "respectfully asking for your vote".

Oz has a parallel one (unfortunately, it evades my Google-fu). In it, Oz expresses gratitude on behalf of himself and his family for "your kindness, and your grace". Just a strong positive note from both of them to end on, only mostly ruined by the shitflinging from the last few months... and their other ads... and all the ads being run by affiliated groups.

Oz has this ad, or one very similar running all the time. Oz stresses that he is like, amazingly super compassionate, and that the real problem is extremism on both sides. His ads position him as a moderate, who just want solutions gosh-darnit by listening and working together and building a reality-warping engine from a condensed singularity of generic moderation.

Both men have allies running harsh attack ads. CRAZY JOHN FETTERMAN WANTS CRIMINALS TO RUN WILD. He also, I hear, MOOCHES OFF HIS PARENTS. It must be nice to actually work for a year, and be so upset about it that you have daddy buy you a political office that is supposed to be extremely part time instead. There is another pair of ads featuring black people ripping into Fetterman for the whole situation where he heard gunfire, grabbed a shotgun, and held up the first black jogger he saw. Obviously a brutally negative ad aimed directly at the black community in Philly.

The other side has ads running against Oz, but almost more at Republicans in general. Republicans want to BAN ALL ABORTION even in cases of RAPE AND INCEST. Look at this 10 YEAR OLD GIRL who could be FORCED TO CARRY HER RAPISTS BABY. Republicans apparently also are going to DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. These ads focus less on attacking Oz directly, and more on the logic that as a Republican vote, he'll enable the other more extreme Republicans, which is an interesting bit of raw tribalism/game theory. They make a bit of hay out of Oz's statement at the debate that abortion should be between "a woman and her doctor and local politicians", but not as much as is made of Fetterman's performance. One ad just runs this clip, almost without commentary. Another has a bunch of Very Concerned People discussing how much Fetterman's debate failure changed their opinions, because he clearly can't do the job. One line effectively pings off a previous Fetterman ad where he bizarrely talks about how grateful he was to get to spent time with his family while recovering, by saying that he looks like he should be resting with his family instead of running for Senate. Oz is also going to RAISE YOUR TAXES (lolwut?), including one little snippet that should win an award for dishonesty, where the name "OZ" is pasted above a newspaper headline style snippet reading "CUT MEDICARE" and "RAISED YOUR TAXES", clearly implying that he has already done so, in spite of his never having held office before.

So, I want to talk about the REPUBLICAN PLAN TO DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. I went to look and see if this is something that anyone is actually talking about, but what I'm mostly finding is onion links in partisan outlets that link to stories that link to stories that link to stories that have that one time in 2010 that Mike Lee said we were going to have to do something about SS going insolvent. Are there any actual, current plans by actual Republicans to do anything that could reasonably be called "gutting SS/Medicare"? My impression is of desperate, disingenuous fearmongering, but I only have so much tolerance for digging through Dark Hinting from the outgroup, and I'm not entirely discounting the possibility that there is something serious in there.

Finally, some Kabbalah. I find it delightful that his support for releasing criminals has been an albatross around the neck of a candidate named Fetter-man. Unfortunately, the surname apparently has no linguistic connection to fetters, it's actually an old Germanic nickname/insult for "the fat guy", which again is odd because John looks like he has lost a bunch of weight, all of which went to his hideous neck goiter. "Mehmet Oz", OTOH, apparently just means "praiseworthy courage", which is so bland and boring and inappropriate I can't even make fun of it.

"John Fetterman" has a gematria of 1065, which is the Return of Partnership Income Tax form. "Mehmet Oz" has a gematria of 728, and Luke 7:28 reads "I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John; yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” The Khabbalistic implications of this are obvious, but I cannot find anything saying if Oz was a C-section or not. If Fetterman wins, this should be a critical attribute of the next Republican challenger in 2028.

If there is some hidden message in their names that will reveal the winner, it eludes me. But I can say with confidence and joy that 48 hours from now I will be 5+ years away from seeing a single ad for either of these fuckheads again. May God have mercy on us all.

There is another pair of ads featuring black people ripping into Fetterman for the whole situation where he heard gunfire, grabbed a shotgun, and held up the first black jogger he saw.

Wait, what??

This situation.

So, I want to talk about the REPUBLICAN PLAN TO DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. I went to look and see if this is something that anyone is actually talking about, but what I'm mostly finding is onion links in partisan outlets that link to stories that link to stories that link to stories that have that one time in 2010 that Mike Lee said we were going to have to do something about SS going insolvent. Are there any actual, current plans by actual Republicans to do anything that could reasonably be called "gutting SS/Medicare"? My impression is of desperate, disingenuous fearmongering, but I only have so much tolerance for digging through Dark Hinting from the outgroup, and I'm not entirely discounting the possibility that there is something serious in there.

(I had seen those headlines and hadn't dug deeper. Here's what I found with a quick web search.)

I think you're talking about New York Times articles like "Republicans, Eyeing Majority, Float Changes to Social Security and Medicare". For concrete proposals, it links indirectly to https://banks.house.gov/uploadedfiles/budget_fy22_final.pdf which includes details such as

  • Increasing the Medicare/Social Security age and enshrining future increases in law by tying them to life expectancy.

  • Privatizing Medicare/Social Security.

These (and a lot of other details I didn't read carefully nor am at all qualified to analyze) are framed as responsible ways to keep those programs running. And, of course, the minority party always proposes things when out of power that they never seriously try to enact when they think they might actually pass. But the House Republicans (well, the RSC which is apparently 156 out of 212 current House Republicans) really did publish a wishlist of what they want in a budget and it included those things.

The linked article "Entitlement, Spending Cap Plans Linked by GOP to Debt-Limit Deal" quotes Republican politicans talking about that plan in interviews for that article published October 11, 2022, and that the plan itself was published in June.

Increasing the retirement age/pension age is something they are also considering here in Ireland (it was supposed to happen last year, but public reaction was so bad they sat on it) so it's one of the tools governments are trying when struggling with the "pensions timebomb". I think privatising Medicare/Social Security would be a bad idea, as these are huge government programmes and there are enough layers of bureaucracy without having to deal with "which private entity took over my pension and have they gone bust or sold it on to someone?" with privatisation.

I actually did find that NYT article, but it's paywalled and thus memory-holed. The plan probably deserves it's own discussion thread, but at a glance, it looks like a ACA style "reform", which makes all the rhetoric fucking hilarious.

The white hoodie Fetterman wears in the new tv ads makes it look like he died and this is how John Fetterman looks in heaven. The post stroke gentle voice adds to the effect. We are not voting for John Fetterman, we are voting for his ghost. Somewhere, Connor lamb won't stop telling everyone how many push ups he can do.

If Oz wins, he can thank the Fetterman campaign and national democrats for loudly painting him as pro-life when he was pro choice up until 2019.

Vote Erik, at least you can sneer at whoever wins with a clear conscience.

There's no way to paint an Oz win as anything other than an own-goal by Dems. They had a chance to not nominate Fetterman after his stroke, they had a chance to maybe pull him from contention and put forth a better challenger, they absolutely had the choice to not put Fetterman up to a debate, and probably made it worse by making it so late in the election cycle. And they definitely should not have run an ad campaign that gave Oz cover for previous positions that might have killed his appeal to Republicans.

And I'm sure they also had a hand in Oz getting the nom too.

Oz is an effective showman which counts for a lot, but way early on not even his own party was optimistic about his chances.

Live update: in line at polling station. High turnout, I'm in and out most years. Tough to read the crowd, not obviously r or d. Turnout is typically good for D, but in this case it means the early mail votes that came pre debate are less decisive.

I don't think you could have looked very sincerely if you're mostly seeing quotes from 2010.

For example, in August, Ron Johnson was saying regarding social security:

“If you qualify for the entitlement, you just get it no matter what the cost,” Johnson said. “And our problem in this country is that more than 70 percent of our federal budget, of our federal spending, is all mandatory spending. It’s on automatic pilot. It never — you just don’t do proper oversight. You don’t get in there and fix the programs going bankrupt. It’s just on automatic pilot.”

“What we ought to be doing is we ought to turn everything into discretionary spending so it’s all evaluated so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be going bankrupt,” Johnson said. “As long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/ron-johnson-medicare-social-security/

Now I'd say that it's a bit hysterical to call this destroying social security, but making social security discretionary would dramatically change how secure that program is.

Maybe Google just wasn't showing me paywalled results, or my phrasing was selecting for outlets like Rawstory.

Reminds me of the story of the Super-Conducting Super Collider and how the physicists working on it oddly resisted implementing cost-control software. Now, in terms of vibes, I can imagine that the public, or at least the pro-welfare people, would probably also resist cost-control scrutinization of current welfare programs, but on the other hand, could it be any worse than existing means-testing?

Just to be clear, are you calling social security "welfare"?

I know it's not the same as assistance for poverty, but I figured it was a similar idea. I guess I should have said "social expenditures" instead of "welfare."

I really wish that Republicans were awesome enough to destroy social security and Medicaid but I know in my heart that they never will.

So what do you guys think was up with trumps big announcement tonight? The music started playing, he looked off in the distance in contemplation for an uncomfortable minute, made a pretty good soliloquy speech then announced that he will make a big announcement at Mar Lago on the 15th. Stating that he did not want to detract from the candidates running for election tomorrow.

  • Did he change his mind on a run for presidency at the last minute?

  • Did he personally change his mind last minute to move his presidential announcement?

  • Was he told to stand down by someone in the party?

  • Was this all some scripted thing to get the MAGA vote for tomorrow?

I think it must have been something last minute because making a half-ass announcement like that is burning some credibility, as well as a wasted opportunity to be the first to maneuver and scare off his political rivals in the GOP. I'm really confused by the political strategy for this blown announcement thing.

Trump was never going to announce his run at a random rally in Ohio.

People talk, still, about the moment that he came down the escalator in trump tower. Of course he’s going to make a huge show of his announcement by doing it at mar a lago.

I know this is off-topic for an election thread, but what happened to all the "Trump is going to jail for sure this time" due to the top-secret documents he took without permission investigation? That seems to have quietly gone nowhere, like all the impeachment enthusiasm.

Is he going to be arrested? Or was this just more of the same?

Trump going to jail seems unlikely, but investigating and prosecuting can take a long time, so if he were to be it taking this long isn't that much evidence against

Not to mention that the DoJ won't do an indictment of a political figure within like 90 days of an election.

I know this is off-topic for an election thread, but what happened to all the "Trump is going to jail for sure this time" due to the top-secret documents he took without permission investigation? That seems to have quietly gone nowhere, like all the impeachment enthusiasm.

Is he going to be arrested? Or was this just more of the same?

Good question.

Who is Donald Trump, and what was all this grand show that began in 2015 about?

There are three possible explanations.

1/ Donald Trump is the most evil man alive, new Hitler who wanted to destroy our precious democracy and bring back thousand years old reich. Fortunately, he was thwarted and stopped by brave and vigilant people of color.

2/ Donald Trump is the greatest hero alive, new Jesus who wanted to save America from liberal pedophiles and make it great again. Unfortunately, he was stabbed in the back and defeated.

3/

https://i.imgur.com/P5Ow9yw.jpg

Now, look what happened after 2020: nothing for two years. Nothing at all happened to Donald Trump, his family and his properties. Some people who trusted him are tortured in prison (no one cares, least of all Trump), but Don is safe and secure as usual, he got away with everything as he always had for his whole life.

So, what explanation looks most plausible?

Is Jeffery Epstein just out of shot in that photo?

If I understand everything correctly, the whole thing is tied up in court at the moment over what was seized at Mar-A-Lago. The court-appointed special master is still reviewing everything to decide what Trump gets back as part of his personal effects and what the FBI gets to use as evidence in any criminal prosecutions that may move forward. I think once the legal minutia gets settled, the press will start reporting those decisions and it'll get headlines again.

Not everything is tied up.

The DoJ won an appeal at the 5th circuit to get the classified documents specifically.

Many people are expecting an indictment shortly after the election because of the DoJ rules proscribing indictments around an election.

I don't think anyone who should be taken seriously is saying that Trump will go to jail for the documents. They're saying that he might be indicted and convicted. That doesn't mean jailtime.

The /r/politics consensus is pretty much that Trump obviously deserves to go to prison, but nothing will happen to him because he's rich / Democrats are too scared of the Republican backlash to do the right thing.

(Other replies capture the facts on the ground; I'm talking about the feelings from the anti-Trump side of the Culture War.)

I think it must have been something last minute because making a half-ass announcement like that is burning some credibility, as well as a wasted opportunity to be the first to maneuver and scare off his political rivals in the GOP.

I'm not so sure. There's a reason that "two more weeks" is a flippant meme used frequently against MAGA people, Q believers, and low-information dissident rightists. The ecosystem of grifters that has sprung up around these people is practically always promising some big revelation ("trust the plan," "tick tock," "release the kraken," etc.) and it never fails to reel in and rile up the true believers and hardcore partisans.

This just seems like more Trump showmanship:

"Coming straight to your living room this November... an exclusive sneak peak of The Trump Saga, Part 3... The enemies of America and Freedom shall tremble... Libs shall get owned... Mysteries shall be revealed... Tuesday, November 15th...at 8 PM Central... America Shall Be Made Great Again... Only on Truth Social."

People eat this stuff up.

All my Red Team friends are praying he's announcing he will back down and endorse DeSantis. Maybe a little too optimistic.

Politcio has started off their election day coverage with a tweet that's enraging Republicans....

The 2020 presidential election was rife with allegations of voting machine hacks that were later debunked.

Yet there are real risks that hackers could tunnel into voting equipment and other election infrastructure to try to undermine Tuesday’s vote.

https://twitter.com/politico/status/1589568452699820032

The flip from "election deniers" to "legitimately and patriotically questioning the election" is going to be fun to watch and compare.

It's already happened - with a registered Democrat arrested for trying to interfere with a voting machine.

But it heightened concerns among election officials and security experts that conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election could inspire some voters to meddle with - or even attempt to sabotage - election equipment.

But it's ok! Even when it's registered Democrats doing the meddling, it's the fault of the Republicans for their conspiracy theories of Democratic meddling.

Election officials in Colorado use locks and tamper-evident seals on voting equipment, so it becomes apparent if someone has tried to access it. Trigger alerts make machines inoperable if someone tries to tamper with them, which is what happened in Pueblo, according to Ortiz and the Colorado Secretary of State's office.

That is good. This means that people can't hack election infrastructure without detection and we have nothing to worry about. Hopefully no one will make any claims to the contrary.

Republican inspired stochastic election tampering.

That is good. This means that people can't hack election infrastructure without detection and we have nothing to worry about. Hopefully no one will make any claims to the contrary.

Unless the machines are connected to any sort of network, in which case all bets are off.

I'm going to make a complaint/point I've made before about the way Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight handle their election prediction models and how they display the data.

The models they use are subject to pretty large swings:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/senate/?cid=rrpromo

There's some irony that their Senate projection odds have now swung back to where they were back when they first unleashed their model.

It was even worse when it came to Trump's election.

I get that their claim is "we're only predicting what would happen if the elections were held today, we're not actually projecting a winner in the future!" But then what is really the point? Okay, its an interesting metric, but if by your own admission it is subject to massive future uncertainty, shouldn't you reflect that in how you display the data? What are people supposed to use this info for if it isn't accurate enough to guide their actual behavior?

My personal thought is that the model should have another bar on it that tracks their actual confidence in their model's outcome, with confidence increasing as election day approaches.

Nassim Taleb and Silver got into it back in 2018 on this topic, nicely summarized here:

https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the-nate-silver-vs-nassim-taleb-twitter-war-a581dce1f5fc

If the issue is, indeed, that there are massive amounts of 'undecided' voters early in the process and there are potential black swan-esque events that can swing the outcome unexpectedly, then surely, SURELY that should be a factor that is displayed prominently alongside your otherwise straightforward election poll aggregations?

"we're only predicting what would happen if the elections were held today, we're not actually projecting a winner in the future!"

I find this quote somewhat interesting because even though it's nominally election day today, many votes were cast early or absentee already. I voted last week. No information coming out over the weekend could have changed my ballot. I wonder if the current generation of models account for this at all.

On the Fivethirtyeight podcast, Nate Silver stated that pretty much all polling released over the weekend is just pollsters "herding" to try to look better at the last moment and should be treated as having basically zero additional predictive validity. He sounds frustrated by the whole thing, really.

Early or absentee voting by mail is insane ... I don't know how both voting integrity and voting anonymity could be protected.

And even the one in person is bizarre. You lock your vote and can't change your opinion while the campaign is running - what is the point in that.

You lock your vote and can't change your opinion while the campaign is running - what is the point in that.

Convenience, and it seems fine if you've already decided on the election. In my city, there was an incident last week where a brain-damaged man dressed up as Hitler for Halloween because he thought it was funny and didn't understand why others would be offended. I would vote for RetardedHitler over the current governor, so I don't actually need further information on the candidates to determine who I'd vote for.

Why not?

Consider a double-envelope system. Poll workers tick each return address off against registration rolls, then open it and extract the blank, inner envelope. These are passed en masse to a second set of workers/machines who open them and tally the actual votes. The first group sees no votes; the second sees no personal information.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure some county does a stupid implementation. But it’s definitely a solvable problem, and a longstanding one.

How do you prevent a wife ticking a box she is not keen on while her husband is watching over her shoulder? That is also what the voting booth prevents.

Fair point, it does allow coercion.

I have old roommates voting ballots at home. Didn’t use them but seems like some issues there.

It's fairly predictable which neighbourhoods vote for whom. The return address is plenty of information on its own. A rogue mailman could make the votes disappear before they even formally make it into the system.

On top of that, even normal letters get lost or delayed in the mail all the time. It doesn't even need to be malice. If there were only postal votes, pure standard negligence operating procedure would likely cause a fair bit of difference all on its own.

I've often wondered why we don't see targeted ballot drop box spoilage.

Pour gasoline in the drop boxes in the right neighborhoods and you could tilt the election.

There are plenty of folks that are happy to commit arson and vandalism to demonstrate their rage against society, why wouldn't they do it in a way that yields results?

It does happen on occasion but it tends to be mentally ill schizos rather than any serious attempt to delegitimize the process

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/fire-set-to-ballot-drop-box-in-bostons-copley-square-disgrace-to-democracy/2218074/

Also just post office workers being as lazy as possible.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/postal-employee-admits-dumping-mail-including-election-ballots-sent-west-orange-residents

Insofar as voting early is a conscious, voluntary decision then I would say we can expect the person casting the early vote to have concluded that they have seen enough to make up their mind and that (almost) nothing would change it, so they accept that they can't alter their vote once submitted.

For me, though, I get some extra utility from physically seeing my ballot deposited in a box on the day of the election. Genuinely hard for me to accept the idea that my ballot could sit in a mailroom or 'secure' box somewhere for more than a few hours, and still believe it couldn't have been tampered with.

Maricopa County has been reporting a lot of trouble with tabulators. Maricopa County is famous for being the location of "Sharpiegate" in the 2020 election.

Sharpiegate was ultimately confirmed. Not all of the ballots were printed on bleed resistant paper, some Trump votes were found to have been lost to bleed through. Not a large number, but it was a real thing.

Problems are being reported at 26+ polling locations. Voters are being told to leave their votes in a locked box to be tabulated at a different location later. There are worries about chain of custody.

Arizona currently has tight races for both the Governor and Senator, so this is going to be a major source of contention going forward.

How long did it take to count races in the 1990s?

It just seems like pure insanity to me that we use these machines to do our elections.

The only people civic minded enough to turn out to run our elections are also 70-90 years old.

So it becomes a problem to have them do counting of ballots given their cognitive decline.

The only people civic minded enough to turn out to run our elections are also 70-90 years old.

So it becomes a problem to have them do counting of ballots given their cognitive decline.

IME, 70-90 years olds in cognitive decline are typically challenged by computer-like machines. Why do we think that they are worse at manual counting than at everything involving the custody and machine tabulation of votes?

Don't people get paid?

Hahaha… oh wait you’re serious.

They either don’t get paid, or paid only a nominal amount, like jury duty.

In 2018 according to my gf's recollection she was paid 90 dollars to run a poll station for 12 hours as a volunteer. You're basically reliant on civic minded people to bother with it at that point I think.

That's wild. NJ is normally $200 for the lowest level volunteers for the day. The two times I did it during Covid, they paid extra, for $400 and $325.

Oh, that's too bad.

I remember being paid like $300 for working as a vote counter (lowest at the totem pole) in Sweden during the 2009 EU parliament elections, so that was pretty attractive for me as one days work as a student.

civic minded people

And exceptionally politically "involved" people.

Where are you?

Here is an example of how it works in Poland, a country with a population size close to California.

There was a second round of presidential election on July 12th, 2020. The poll station closed at 9 pm. Next day, on 13th, the national election committee, announced the results.

https://pkw.gov.pl/uploaded_files/1594724319_obwieszczenie-pkw-20200713-1915.pdf

There were 20 million votes to count, almost all cast in person (out of 30 million eligible voters). No machines were used to cast votes, all of them were done on paper. No machines were used to tabulate them, all tabulation is done manually. Nevertheless, the official results are announced less than 24 hours after the polls close, and unofficial results (ie, enough stations reported results to give 99%+ confidence in election outcomes) are available around midnight the same day.

There is literally no excuse for the idiocy that we see in US every election.

There is literally no excuse for the idiocy that we see in US every election.

How many unique questions are on Polish ballots? IIRC British ballots have only one question typically, but my American one had about 60 odd questions from various overlapping jurisdictions. There are almost certainly more unique suites of ballot questions than voting locations in my county.

But the wide variation in election quality speaks to differing standards and equipment across states and even between adjacent counties.

The one I gave as an example was particularly easy, as there was only one question with two possible choices.

However, for a better analogy, in the national “local” election (555 seats to provincial assemblies, 6,244 seats to county councils, 32,173 seats to commune councils, and 3,162 local government heads, close to 40 000 elected seats in total) in 2018, the official results of Sunday election (and the elections are always on Sunday in Poland, by the way) were announced on Wednesday afternoon.

I don't think you understand the nature of the problem. In general european elections will ask each citizen a handful of questions (for example two votes: one for the senate and one for the parliament). The US has far more elected positions than the average european country and also likes to aggregate local and general elections all in one (probably because general elections happen so frequently). So a normal US ballot will ask the citizen to vote for national elections but also positions in the state and county administration and include things like: seats on the supreme and appeals courts, sheriffs, various public attorneys, one or more referenda questions, seats on the school board, things nobody knows what they are, like comptrollers, etc.

Random example of a ballot

Of course they could just use two ballots, put the one or two national questions on one and everything else in the other and then use two ballot boxes, and then just count the national votes first. I guess it never occured to them.

Blame Bush versus Gore. After the hanging chads etc. some American elections switched to electronic voting machines to avoid similar problems, and now new and exciting problems have come in their wake.

Like the Poles in the comment below, Ireland does paper ballots and manual counting (we even had a mini-scandal when the government of the day, back in the 90s, wanted to introduce electronic voting and bought some machines, but there were so many legal challenges that the machines sat in a warehouse and were never used).

The counts are the best part of the election 😀

Blame Bush versus Gore. After the hanging chads etc. some American elections switched to electronic voting machines to avoid similar problems

Really? Were the hanging chads worse than the 400 voting-machine voters who cast negative 16,000 votes? That was even in the Florida 2000 Presidential election too!

It actually looks to me like Maricopa is trying to get things right: voting machines for accessibility, but instead of storing results on a chip they print a human-readable paper card ballot. The ballot can be immediately scanned for a quick count and to double-check for problems, but then it ends up in a lockbox for recounts or disputes... and if the tabulator isn't working, it just goes in a different container for hand-counting. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those printers cause problems too and need to be taken care of(NSFW audio), but they're independent enough that you could just spoil any half-printed ballots and send someone to another voting machine. Scanners are usually more reliable than printers, but having redundant tabulators too would have been a good idea in hindsight.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those printers cause problems too and need to be taken care of

I didn't know it would be that clip when I clicked on the link, but I was hoping it would be that clip.

"We've got about 20% of the locations out there where there's an issue with the tabulator, where some of the ballots that after people have voted they try and run them through tabulator, and they're not going through," said County Chairman Bill Gates in a video posted by the elections department.

Not only that but the person in charge is called Bill Gates. The memes write themselves honesty.

Y'know, if you're going to insist on the existence of a danger to democracy called "election denialism", you kinda sorta oughta make sure that there is no screwing up of the sort that makes it look like something dodgy is going on.

I don't think there is anything fraudulent, just general incompetence, but hoo boy. If I remember correctly, Maricopa County was one of the places in the 2020 election that gave rise to "this result seems very odd and possibly fake". Again, it was just a matter of a small amount of votes (I think about 3,000) causing it to flip from red to blue, but you really don't want to be always having something (ahem ahem) happening with the way you count votes, it begins to look like a pattern.

It's simply a matter of resources. I was talking to my girlfriend about this who in every mid-term and Presidential Election from 2008 to 2018 volunteered as a site judge in Philly. She was paid a max of 90 dollars for a 12 hour day, plus she got half a day training on setting up the voting machines and had a couple of other volunteers at her site. She often would have to stay late without getting paid any more until a police officer arrived to transport the ballots to the counting facility.

Whereas when I was running elections in a much smaller UK city, I had pretty much a hundred or more of council workers getting paid over time and time in lieu to do the polls and counting. We could train them throughout the year on whatever new set up we were using and do practice runs. And even then we pretty much always had some kind of issue every year. But you only see that internally because we only announced the votes when they were completed at the end. The fact we missed a box until the final sweep or a whole table of counters was reversing the piles in error would never show up in the results because it was caught by the final audit before we announced the final counts. Any challenges by the parties were usually dealt with prior to then as well.

Running a non-messy election is expensive and time consuming and even our electoral officers were getting their numbers cut, because compared to getting the bins collected it doesn't rile up voters in the same way so it's and easy way to cut budget.

I made close to 600 CAD in one day in the last Canadian federal election.

Katie Hobbs, the Dem candidate for governor in Arizona, is the current Secretary of State of Arizona and so is in charge of administering the election. I'm guessing lots of voters are going to be turned off of Hobbs because of this election screwup. Hobbs's opponent is ultra-MAGA so-called election denier Kari Lake who won the Republican primary in part with the help of Democrats who believed that Lake would be a weak candidate. Lake has turned out to have lots of charisma and is skilled at going on the offensive so if she wins should would be an obvious choice for the Republican Vice Presidential nominee.

Hobbs's opponent is ultra-MAGA so-called election denier Kari Lake who won the Democratic Republican primary in part with the help of Democrats who believed that Lake would be a weak candidate.

Just to correct a typo.

Thanks!

This is just so far beyond parody that I can't handle it.

Katie Hobbs, who refused to debate or engage with the campaign in any meaningful way, is also in charge of running the election and now immediately in the morning the system that she (yes, she, since she is literally tasked with it) set up is collapsing.

And while all of this is happening, she is asking for a promotion. Insanity.

It does seem like candidates shouldn't be able to run their own elections.

But I don't recall people on the right having a problem with Brian Kemp as secretary of state overseeing his election to governor.

Maybe this can become a cross-party issue?

Ken Paxton and the rest of the Texas GOP establishment made a lot of noise about election security in Houston, to the point of sending task forces. Significant or not, this is a category where I wish the perception of interference was career-ending.

Are partisans involved in monitoring the chain of custody?

I expect something to get disputed either way, but the big dogs might shut up if their vassals are watching the process.

Who would you suggest monitor instead? Nonpartisans? Where can they be found?

The UN will be happy to help observe your election.

hehehehehehe

They could at least set up an independent authority to run the elections. Here in Australia, both the Federal government and each of the State governments have their own Electoral Commission which is an independent agency that explicitly is meant to be non-partisan. In the US, as best as I can tell, elections are run by under a division by each State's Secretary of State, who is a partisan, elected official. A similar thing I always found silly in the US is that how judges are allowed to be members of political parties (even if they're appointed by governments they could at least give some effort to maintain non-partisanship). Same with most election redistricting.

Obviously, you're not going to be able to weed out every partisan or partisan influence from agencies, but the American approach seems to be 'well, we can't completely get rid of partisanship, so why even bother, just go full partisan and hope things balance out'. I have worked in elections in Australia in the past, and honestly when people describe how things are done in the US I am shocked about how mismanaged and partisan the whole thing is, my experience of Australian elections is extremely positive, non-partisanship seems to actually work at least to some extent.

It's standard practice in elections to never do anything without both a Democrat and a Republican present. I assume the laws don't mention those parties by name, but I'm not sure exactly how they are worded. And by "a Democrat and a Republican", that probably means an election official attesting they are of that party, not, say, someone who currently or has held elected office for that party.

Voting needs to come with a receipt/tracking number similar to UPS/FedEx. Should be able to enter in your number and match that your vote was processed. This doesn’t seem like a difficult control to add.

Hard to make it so that said tracking doesn't allow someone to confirm to others which vote they cast, which then opens up the possibilities of threats and bribery.

That cat already seems well out of the bag with widespread postal voting.

Feels like a risk worth taking compared to right now where I have no confirmation of what happened to my ballot once it’s dropped in the box.

But you at least know that a physical ballot was dropped in a physical box.

You're not going to have someone show up at your door later to provide reward or exact penance for your vote.

I think bribery to be an overblown concern. You can already bribe people today, without them being able to prove that they voted the way you prescribed. Sure, some of them will take money and still vote the other way or not vote at all, but this does not make bribery ineffective, it just pushes up the cost of buying a vote. Ability to prove who you voted for would affect the market price for a vote, and so would probably increase amount of bribery on the margin, but is by no means required to make buying votes an effective strategy.

Think threats and power differentials. Take a look at the history of why the 'secret ballot' is also called the 'Australian ballot'.

These seem to me concerns of marginal importance to election outcomes. They might happen, but I can scarcely imagine that making vote verifiable will make these significantly worse than they already are. Like, what do you mean by “power differentials”, in concrete terms?

So, when Australia was colonized by the Brits, they used it as a penal colony. Of course, they didn't go full Lord of the Flies with the convicts, but sent good, upstanding Brits to run the place and maintain good order. After serving out their sentences, many convicts did have the option of returning to Britain, but lots of them chose to stay. They were free citizens, but obviously, their jibs were cut a bit differently than the better class of good, upstanding Brits who were sent to run the place. The convicts were even free to run for elected office, and some even did. Yet somehow, confusingly, even as time went on and there were many more freed convicts than there were good, upstanding Brits, none of these convicts ever won any elections. Maybe everyone just realized that it was better if good, upstanding Brits continued running the place.

Other folks disagreed, and they managed to implement the 'Australian ballot', where each individual's vote would be totally, completely secret. Suddenly, magically, freed convicts began winning elections and were able to curtail some of the harshest abuses curious practices of the good, upstanding Brits.

There is a reason why people who are working on digital elections really care about a property known as "receipt freeness", that is, that there is no possible way that anyone possesses any information whatsoever which could be used as a receipt to prove how a person voted. The ideal would be for the government to be able to publicize an encrypted database which cannot in any way be used to demonstrate how any person voted, but that each individual can take with them a piece of information which can be combined with this database to verify that their vote was correctly counted (yet still not reveal how they voted).

Okay, and do you have a concrete story for today? Say, all votes are on paper, the scheme is that everyone take home a carbon copy of their own ballot. What problems do you expect it to bring, today?

Different effects in different places. This is a vast country with lots of different local cultures. The example above shows how a local culture can produce very perverse results. We can eliminate any concern in any locale if we just take to heart the lessons of those who came before us and insist on a secret ballot.

If you had asked me 5-10 years ago how the history of freedom of the press (as in 'printing', not as in 'journalist') mattered at all in the internet era, I probably wouldn't have been able to predict what actually transpired in the following years. But I hope I would have thought that it was a hard-fought, good lesson that society learned in the past, so it shouldn't be trivially dismissed.

Stage one is people who are out and proud about their partisan identity showing off their ballot receipts.

Stage two is this becoming a social norm in environments where "everyone" votes the same way, such that not showing your receipt with a correct vote is defecting (cf pronouns in wokestupid spaces or prayers in secular-but-tribally-Christian ones).

Stage three is defectors suffering professional consequences such that there is no longer a meaningfully free vote.

I think this could happen within 2 years given the current level of partisan bitterness in America.

Isn’t that point kind of moot when remote voting has become the norm in Arizona?

I've been thinking, US is so low trust we should probably use the purple thumb. Only in person votes and everyone gets inked when they vote.

I don’t know about other places, but I can track my ballot here in Utah.

If this were in any other country, the UN's election monitors would cry foul. And not entirely unreasonably. Even assuming that the election is entirely legit and no one involved at all means badly, with a process like this, what reason does anyone have to believe that?

Ultimately, you can't have a functioning democracy if you can't convince the losers that they lost a fair game. In order to do that, it is imperative not to have procedural problems during the elections, let alone systematic procedural problems.

I'm trying to figure out

A) How this wasn't caught and prepared for way in advance?

B) Why there isn't an established backup protocol to handle this eventuality?

C) Why is this treated as normal an unavoidable by the respective authorities handling it?

There's no surprises here. The date is known well in advance, there's various tried 'n' true approaches to the process. The list of excuses for botching it is pretty short.

The only explanation that doesn't require incompetent and malfeasance is a basic shortage of labor or materials or something due to ongoing supply chain issues.

EVEN THEN, such an issue should have been noted in advance of the election.

You should probably add

D) Did this actually happen?

I don’t see a source, and ymeshkout seems to be questioning the conclusions on sharpiegate.

Using a throwaway account for op-sec. I'm a regular lurker and inconsistent poster here. I'm a believer that there is some persistent Democrat election fraud in Philly, Chicago, Atlanta and a few other blue cities in the form of organized ballot harvesting in ways that are, let's say, creative. I don't think the same is structurally possible in Arizona for Democrats in volumes that would matter enough to predictably swing an election.

Maricopa, despite being a Democrat stronghold, is not THAT Democratic. There are precincts in Philly and Chicago that return 95%+ for Democrats. Arizona, you might get 70% D in certain precincts in Maricopa, and the 30% that vote R are damned proud about it. Because AZ is purple and this is the west, we like to fight about politics with our neighbors. Do you think that the Republican poll watchers in Maricopa jurisdictions will take bribes to look the other way? No, they raise holy hell about it if they get a sniff of malfeasance.

I'd go out on a limb and say that the problems in Maricopa are just normal human fuckuppery, and not some sinister ploy by Katie Hobbs and her ilk to steal the election. If you voted early on-site in any Maricopa jurisdiction, guess what. You filled out a paper ballot and stuck it in a lock box, just like the voting locations with automated tabulators are having people do today. You even used a sharpie-type marker to do it. So I think the concerns are overblown and we'll end up with Governor Kari Lake anyway.

Sharpiegate was ultimately confirmed. Not all of the ballots were printed on bleed resistant paper, some Trump votes were found to have been lost to bleed through. Not a large number, but it was a real thing.

The original Sharpiegate claim was that tabulating machines rejected ballots filled out with a sharpie marker, and that poll workers were intentionally giving people sharpies to invalidate their ballots. What you're claiming was "confirmed" appears to be a different theory involving bleedthrough, not necessarily machine invalidation.

Either way, what is your source that Sharpiegate v2.0 was confirmed? I was able to find some confirmation that bleed through is possible, but every source I found indicated the ballots were printed off-set to avoid any issues with bleed through. What is your evidence that bleed through caused votes to be lost? How many votes exactly?

I thought that the bleedthrough was supposed to have been leading to machine invalidation, in that the part with the bleedthrough would be read as having multiple selections, and thus a spoiled ballot?

If ballots were indeed being invalidated because of sharpies, your explanation is a plausible one. But what is the evidence that ballots were invalidated? Maricopa election officials issued this statement back in Nov 4 2020:

sharpies do not invalidate ballots. We did extensive testing on multiple different types of ink with our new vote tabulation equipment. Sharpies are recommended by the manufacturer because they provide the fastest-drying ink. The offset columns on ballots ensure that any bleed-through will not impact your vote. For this reason, sharpies were provided to in-person voters on Election Day.

Has anything come up since to contradict their claims?

The Cyberninjas report definitely shows that the sharpies were bleeding through -- apparently they only examined ~7k ballots for this issue and found none where it caused invalidation -- so probably not a major impact, although they suggest that they found some ballots misaligned due to being printed on normal office printers, which suggests that the offset method was not necessarily failsafe. They promise a full evaluation by some kind of machine analysis, but I'm not sure whether they delivered on this. (ninjas are great on initial action but don't necessarily keep their promises)

This is not an issue I care about either way particularly, but a couple of things occur to me:

  • Why would you use a sharpie at all? The excuse at the time was that they dry faster than other pens, which seems to me false; normal ballpoint pens have essentially zero dry time, and even the expensive rollerball ones seem faster than a sharpie, which will definitely smudge for a few seconds after use -- and certainly bleed through when ballots are printed on office paper.

  • It sure is hard to find anything other than "Sharpiegate lol, that was totally debunked dummy" results on Google these days -- I was only able to find the cyberninja report (which actually examines the issue in a serious way, and seems to give a fair assessment of the results) because I remembered that some organization with a dumb name had audited the Maricopa ballots, and thus could search for it directly.

Thank you for digging that up! That's at least plausible indicator that bleed through might theoretically be a problem. I agree with you that the sharpie drying claim is suspicious, based solely on everyday experience, but I also have no idea what kind of paper is used in ballots. The Cyberninjas did, and they could've spent $20 at Office Depot and thoroughly tested this theory out.

@DradisPing could the Cyberninja report be what you remember? If so, does it help you recall where you picked up the other claims of Trump ballots being invalidated because of bleed through?

Sorry had some stuff to do earlier.

So from the time I remember seeing articles like this focussed on bleed through https://itnshow.com/2020/11/07/arizona-election-official-seems-to-confirm-that-bleed-through-from-sharpie-markers-do-impact-votes/

It was a well known issue, Sharpies had been banned in previous elections for that reason. That's why the woman was freaking out.

The response was there was no need to worry because of a combination of offset printing and VoteSecure paper to avoid bleed through issues. It turns out the paper wasn't used in all cases.

https://rumble.com/vjw41g-audit-team-caught-them-ballots-were-on-wrong-paper-stock-verifies-sharpiega.html

https://www.westernjournal.com/az-audit-revelation-wrong-paper-used-ballots-confirm-sharpiegate-according-az-sen-president/

So the paper thing irked me because it was a specific broken promise. If a printout was misaligned then it would register as an invalid over vote.

Someone fairly prominent on Twitter was claiming they found a handful of instances of bleed through invalidating Trump votes, but I can't for the life of me remember who.

Someone fairly prominent on Twitter was claiming they found a handful of instances of bleed through invalidating Trump votes, but I can't for the life of me remember who.

If your only evidence of ballots being invalidated from bleed through is that you remember someone prominent saying that on Twitter, do you still stand by that belief?

Why would you use a sharpie at all?

...When filling in my ballot selections this afternoon, while laboriously scribbling in the tenth little square, I found myself thinking "man, I wish I could use a sharpie for this". This despite having read the sharpiegate claim here this morning,

The article is misstating the original claim. It was always about bleed through. Republicans had seen bleed through issues in the past, that's why they were so concerned.

They were offset, but some ballots weren't properly aligned. It wasn't a significant number, but my recollection is that they found some.

It wasn't a significant number, but my recollection is that they found some.

Do you have a source besides your recollection?

my recollection is that

You know the "source: trust me, bro" joke? You are doing it to us right now. Knowing how fallible human memory is, we can't take vague recollections as meaningful evidence.

"Why bother? Boo outgroup." Don't.

You're doing the lord's work. Please keep up the civil discourse and I will work to do the same. Don't listen to the fools wanting to destroy our beautiful corner of the internet.

There are worries about chain of custody.

In most jurisdictions, on-site tabulation wasn't done until relatively recently, unless you go back to the days of lever machines. My own precinct in Pennsylvania didn't have them until the 2020 primary. Before that, it was all electronic and all you got was a plastic card that you'd literally throw on a pile on a table when you were finished. At least then, I guess, you could make the argument that the poll worker didn't know what was on the card. Before that, though, we used punchcards, and you'd drop the ballot into a box and trust that it wouldn't be tampered with. Before that it was hand marking paper. Hand-delivering ballots to the local board of elections was the norm throughout most of American history, especially in more rural locations that didn't tend to have mechanical voting machines.

Are we expecting the same delay in counting mail-in ballots as we were in the 2020 election, which caused the vote counts to flip in favour of the Democrats over night?

I certainly am in Wisconsin. See here for my explanation and some additional discussion.

I've already seen several articles warning about/laying the groundwork for this (depending on your perspective). Google "red mirage."

I'm going to say no. Turnout in midterms is substantially lower, and there were lots of mail-in votes in 2020 due to covid.

Remember: it could be worse.

Link doesn't load for me

Odd. Can you see it on this tag? It’s a telling of the Battle of Athens, August 1946.

Certainly could.

So everybody around is now like "please vote, please vote". I'd like to challenge that. I'll start with the observation that while obviously not everybody votes who has the right to, we don't exactly have a crisis level of participation here, we have about 2/3 of voters turn out. Which isn't that bad, it's not like a tiny group of people are deciding for the whole country.

Now, if somebody is so disinterested in politics - or so lazy, or disappointed, or uninformed - that they don't want to vote, why should any effort be spent on convincing them? Their vote probably would not be well thought out, and they would probably fail to accurately appreciate the consequences of their choices. Best case they'd vote at random, worst case they'd follow the first demagogue or pretty face they encounter. I mean, if you work for your local neighborhood demagogue, it's exactly what you want I guess, but why anybody else would support such an effort? I'd rather say the exact opposite - please don't vote unless you understand what it is about and what are you voting for - in which case you probably don't need anybody else to tell you what to do anyway!

The marginal voter has a high propensity to break for Democrats. This explains blue tribe cheerleading about the voting for the sake of voting. Get out the vote campaigns help Democrats.

This may have been the case a decade ago, but I'd be interested in anything showing that it still holds empirically with increasing polarisation on density and education, and decreasing polarisation on race.

Of course, I'd expect anyone cheerleading about voting for the sake of voting to benefit their own politics on average, because people cheerlead to their own social networks which usually are in political alignment with them.

I see 40% voter turnout for the 2018 midterms, which were a record high. I'm not sure what's projected for these ones.

We compel eligible people to vote here in Australia, and overall I'm a massive fan of it. Part of that is that politicking does not need to drive turnout itself, so ironically the half-panicked "please vote, please vote" stuff doesn't feature.

This says 66.9%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections#Turnout_statistics

midterms, not presidential

Well, if these people vote in presidential, that means they know how to vote and are able to, but still choose not to. I think I shoudn't worry about them not participating - it's not like they were excluded - they specifically chose to abstain, that's as valid as any other vote.

Desire to vote and political knowledge are spectrums and, I'd assume, correlated. Everyone above a certain level of desire to vote does so. Get-out-the-vote efforts lower the level. Thus I'd figure the resulting voters are not going to vote at random, because their level of political knowledge is better than that; you'd have to reach pretty amazing levels of turnout before you hit people with little enough knowledge to vote randomly or otherwise in a hideously misinformed fashion.

I'd rather say the exact opposite - please don't vote unless you understand what it is about and what are you voting for - in which case you probably don't need anybody else to tell you what to do anyway!

I'd love to know the results if we re-ran our elections on that basis, but I expect that world would be terrifyingly different than the one we live in, in ways you and I can't even predict.

But across the mass of people, even really smart people, you'd be shocked how many people forget what day election day is. I spend much of election week reminding personal friends to vote (for local candidates), and a decent number of them forget what day it was and didn't schedule it in.

I'm not sure it'd be that different, actually. I mean if only 30% voted, these people wouldn't be some Martians - they'd be somebody's peers, friends, coworkers, relatives, etc. - so they'd be part of the same culture. If you're an academia and everybody around votes Democrat, and some of them would be too hang over to vote, the rest would still vote Democrat. If you're in rural Tennessee and everybody around votes Republican, and you just forget to vote - the rest would vote Republican anyway. Sure, some patterns may shift here and there, but I suspect it won't be that different even if much less people voted than do now.

But that's assuming that the knowledge of politics is evenly and randomly distributed across other factors and identities. It isn't. You'd have far more rich educated voters and far fewer poor and elderly voters. Do red tribe and blue tribe coalitions even make sense once you disenfranchise major portions of each base?

I think it's politically motivated from the Democrats to increase their votes. This is mostly speculation/extrapolation, but there are multiple pieces of evidence:

First, note that the majority of the pressure appears to coming from Blue Tribe looking sources. Although they don't explicitly say who to vote for, you can guess that they personally are voting for the Democrats based on the general tone of the piece and source.

Second, my general opinion on American politics is that the Democrats and Republicans are mostly the same mix of generally incompetent and corrupt politicians who are there with the primary goal of being elected and accumulating wealth, power, and prestige, and a secondary goal of serving the voters and advancing their team's agenda, but only just enough to keep the voters happy enough to keep them in power. Both sides do this in different ways, but the Democrats are much better at disguising it with nice sounding words and smiling faces. Therefore, the average uninformed voter tends to think that the Democrats are better than the Republicans, because on the surface they appear better. Therefore, the marginal lazy/uninformed voter is more likely to vote Democrat. This provides a motivation for Democrat aligned groups to want to increase voter turnout.

Even if this effect is minor and the marginal uninformed voter has 60-40 odds in favor of voting Democrat, that's still an improvement for them. Increasing participation in the Democratic process is just an excuse, you're right that it isn't about helping society.

I don't pretend to understand the electoral details, but PredictIt prices for Republicans taking the senate seem to have dipped from 82¢ to 66¢ in the past three hours. (See the 24h tab.) So the early results are not as red as expected, or maybe bettors are reacting to Maricopa county situation.

EDIT: Down to 38¢ as of 11:13 EST. Obviously still a fluid situation, but it's looking like the DNC's strategy of drumming on abortion and calling their enemies semi-fascists basically worked.

This seems to be the biggest news from early voting, besides Florida seeing an overwhelming GOP victory.

Betting market odds for Democrat control of the Senate went from roughly 20% to roughly 40% in a few hours. The surge seems to have paused or plateaued, and the GOP is still favored to win control of the Senate, but it's definitely worth paying attention to. Tonight promises to be a nail-biter.

This is normal for PredictIt. If you use the site a lot you'll notice the heavy Red bias before the mass of normie users fill up the volume to something more realistic right before the election starts.

Sounds like money to be made

I made 1.75x on Fetterman last night. Feeling pretty good.


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